O-Pee-Chee Baseball Card Feelings

This morning I went to the bingo hall where sports card show sets up the last Saturday of every month.  I got there kind of late, and to my disappointment the dude with the most baseball stuff was already packing up. But I found another guy with a box that just said "1970s Baseball Singles," which is absolutely ideal, in that you know there's going to be neat stuff in there, and you also know that if he hasn't bothered sorting any of it out, nothing is going to cost any more than a dollar, thus putting it right in the zone.  I came away with thirteen entirely rad baseball cards from 1970 and 1971 for the totally reasonable price of five dollars.  I would do this again in a heartbeat.  After the jump, let me tell you about them.


KS


They're all O-Pee-Chee, making them rarer, Frencher, and cheaper than their Topps equivalents, which are all points in their favour.  You guys know about O-Pee-Chee cards, right?  They're basically bizarro Topps, usually (but not always!) with identical fronts but backs made wonderful by the inclusion of French.  It wasn't always like that: O-Pee-Chee totally did its own thing with hockey cards long long ago, but then they pretty much started issuing bizarro Topps sets, bigger sets for hockey, smaller sets for baseball.  An important point to keep in mind is that nobody wants these.  Not the baseball ones, anyway.    


You really can't overstate how much better the French makes this stuff.  Take the back of Bob Gibson's 1971 card:  "Bob détient un record des majeures avec 8 ans avec 200 retraits au bâton ou plus.  En tête de la L. N. pour les victoires en 1970, établit un nouveau record du club pour les retraits au bâton et gagna le Trophée Cy Young. En 1968, MPM de 1.12 en 305 manches." 


COME ON HOW AWESOME IS THAT? 


I actually totally miss the weird parallel universe of baseball in French: Expos games used to be carried nationally on Radio Canada (which despite its name is also television) and it was just strange strange, stuff, even if you had a decent grasp of the language. The terminology was just bananas.  Recently I came across this glossary from Baseball Reference, which begins with this introduction:


"Most of the vocabulary below was standardized at the time of the creation of the Montreal Expos in 1969, when major French language newspapers covering the team, the Société Radio Canada, which televized its games, and the Réseau Radio-média which held radio broadcasting rights, agreed to use a list of terms recommended by linguists and baseball experts. Broadcasters and journalists such as Jacques Doucet, Jean-Paul Sarrault, Jean-Pierre Roy, Claude Raymond and Guy Ferron were instrumental in spreading these terms to the general population."  


So that's how it happened.  Neat. 


Anyway, I got some cards today, and here is what makes each of these cards awesome:    


1970 Sandy Alomar: Father of Roberto (and to a lesser extent Sandy Jr.); real name Santos. 


1970 Bill Lee: One of arguably three worthwhile hippies.  


1970 Curt Flood, 1970 A. Messersmith: When you are young, you dream of being a baseball player.  When you are older, you dream of being in a union as awesome as the MLBPA.  These two cards reflect that more mature fantasy.


1971 Bob Gibson: That picture is just . . . I mean my god that picture.


1971 Jesus Alou: Any Alou, any generation, has my unfailing support.


1971 Cookie Rojas: Awesome photo of a SS hanging in tough while the runner slides in hard to bust up the double play; bonus points for being a utility guy named "Cookie."


1971 Jerry Grote: Part of my growing "Guys Named Groat/Grote" collection I started last year with a 1963 Dick Groat.  Great photo of a guy who has just pounded the ball deep into the hole, knows he could leg it out if he was anybody but the catcher, but is, tragically, the catcher.  Once caught every inning of a twenty-four inning 1-0 loss to the Astros. Grote went 2 for 7 with a walk.     


1970 Vida Blue/Gene Tenace: Blue is extremely well known for having been awesome; Gene Tenace is a World Series MVP with like six rings and was a Blue Jays coach seemingly forever.


1970 Dennis Doyle/Larry Bowa: If you ended up coaching or managing at the major league level, I probably want your baseball card.  Not sure why that is, but here I am, undeniably with a Larry Bowa rookie card.


1970 Jack Jenkins/Bill Buckner: lol


1970 Bob Gibson: Are there any bad pictures of Bob Gibson?  Was he just always this amazing? 


1970 Joe Torre: It is entirely possible to hate the Yankees and have no problem with Joe Torre, especially if you read The Yankee Years, which you should, especially if you want to think A-Rod is even lamer than you already do.